Dylan at Play

Book excerpt: Dylan at Play offers a selection of writings that can challenge and engross readers eager for new ways to meet the singularity of Bob Dylan’s work. We have no interest in competing with the almost numberless and ever-increasing quantity of critical and encyclopedic writing on Dylan. Our goal with this collection has been play and not categorizing or defining. We solicited material that might, in sum, create a vision of both reverent scrutiny and mischief. In this collection, you’ll find writers who generally are not already fixtures in the Dylan Criticism industry. Here you’ll meet a webmaster, theologians, a linguist, a poet, a polyglot, scholars and teachers. The writers in this collection have heard Dylan’s art calling to them through their particular frameworks of meaning and expression, and the pieces here are a result of their abilities to find the voices to respond to that call. We hope above all that readers of Dylan at Play will become inspired to invent and play with their own experiences of this artist.